Errol Flynn Pictured With Beverley Aadland at The Lido Nightclub on Swallow Street, just off Piccadilly, 5th May 1959. The Couple Starred In The Film Cuban Rebel Girls And Had A Highly Publicised Relationship For The Last Two Years Of Flynns Life. Photo: Rex Features

In like Flynn Warts and All!!

“All around the world I was equated with sex”

-Errol Flynn

Errol Flynn once said: ‘I like my whisky old, and my women young’ and the above photo, while not saying anything about his choice of whisky, certainly says something about his taste in women, or should it be girls. He was one of Hollywood’s all-time great ladies’ men — a spirited womaniser who inspired the expression “in like Flynn.”

The picture above of Flynn, from May 1959, was taken a month or so before his fiftieth birthday and he’s accompanied by his girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, who was still a few months from her 17th birthday that September. According to Beverly’s mother, a former showgirl called Florence and who wrote about Flynn and Aadland’s romance in a book called The Big Love, by the summer of 1959 they had already been together for a year.

His tastes in young women caught up with him in 1943, when he was tried for statutory rape. Two underage girls (“jailbait” and “San Quentin quail”) claimed he had bedded them. Flynn was acquitted.

Flynn spent his breaks during the trial hitting on the teenager who ran the courthouse’s cigarette stand. Flynn invited her home — and she later became his second wife.

Errol Flynn was that guy — that one guy, we all know them — who was too handsome for his own good. Early on, he figured out what his looks could do for him, and he rode that wave to various destinations. He was a textbook womaniser, an astoundingly successful player — a lech, a cad, a rake, and any number of other British-sounding adjectives that describe the combination of sexual appetite and the charisma required to feed it.